We only want the Earth, was one of the great rallying cries of oppressed people from many European countries throughout much of the 18th - 19th and early part ot the 20th century's.

Adding further to this call, our own patriot son Fintan Lalor, from Co Laois, prominent amongst the leadership of the Young Ireland Movement of the 1842/48 period, composed the historic phrase ! From the Earth to the Sky! and all Within, not to use and abuse, but to nurture and harvest, to treat with respect and enjoy its bounty and to hand on calmly and safely to succeeding generations.

This was to become the rallying call of the Young Ireland Movement during that period and was later to influence succeeding generations, seeking independence for Ireland, while advocating necessary social change in Irish society.

In the spring of 1848 Young Ireland leaders Thomas Francis Meagher ( known as Meagher of the sword) and William Smith O Brien brought home from Paris, our first Tricolour flag , the banner having been designed and presented to them as the flag of a future Irish Republic, by the revolutionary women, from the " Paris Communes" , of the 1848/49 period.

Thomas Francis Meagher and Smith O Brien were to be later transported to Van Diemen’s Land -Tasmania, after the failed 1848 rebellion. While Peter Lalor, younger brother of Fintan led an armed uprising by exploited mine workers at the Eureka Stockade in 1854, an event of significant social importance in Australian history.

Other prominent leaders of the Young Ireland Movement were Newry based solictor John Mitchell, who contributed items to the Nation freedom newspaper of the period and later published the United Irishman and who was also transported to Tasmania from where he managed to escape to the U.S.A. A noteworthy aspect of the Young Ireland Movement, was the cross community composition of its leadership.

Another most prominent Young Ireland leader been Tomas Davis, whose statue to day stands proudly in College Green, facing Trinity College, and who then along with been editor of the Nation freedom newspaper was also composer of many patriotic and social releated poems and ballads. These include, A Nation Once Again, and Blue Eyes and Golden Hair, the sad tale of a Munster country girl who came to live in the city, only to succumb to the dead'ly conta'gious consumption, the term then for T.B and which along with cholera, were the scourge of that era, as was T.B to remain right up to the 1950's, in Ireland.

Tomas Davis was himself to die from cholera , at the early age of just thirty one, as also was his young and gifted comrade Fintan Lalor. Here we must also pay due respect to one patriotic fiesty lady,Jane Franiska Wilde, herself off the ruling planter class, who wrote under the pen name, Speranza, and who contributed prose and verse to the pages of the Nation freedom newspaper and was composer of, The" Famine Years" the iconic record in sad and bitter verse of the grear hunger of the 1840 period, and which I intend to put up here on site.

The colours of that Orange, White and Green Tricolour,brought home from Paris, by the Young Ireland leaders of 1848, was to be the adapted flag in the following 20th century by our revolutionary heroes , who flung out the banner from the G.P.O on Dublin’s O Connell St, as they declared that Sovereign Irish Republic in April 1916. The tricolour was later to become the symbol of resistance to British Imperial rule during our historic struggle for Independence 1919 to 1921 and today is the flag of our country, whose People must again assert their Sovereignty of our Republic.